5 Women on the Sweet Relief of Giving Zero F**ks

A popular phrase has been knocking around the Internet the last few years, mostly in describing women: (She) "gives zero fucks." It's shorthand for women who have managed to slip the fairly stringent bonds of all the things women are supposed to care about: looks, weight, marriage, children, behaving.

At a glance, the rise of giving zero fucks appears to have gone hand-in-hand with the rise of powerful women over the age of 40. I don't think this is a coincidence. Women are, arguably for the first time in history, financially independent. We are marrying later or not at all. Fewer of us are choosing to have children. While complications come with all these decisions—Sarah Silverman was the latest to state the obvious the other day, when she pointed out that women can't have it all—so, too, does power. Sustained power. Which oftentimes translates more simply into less dependence on men and their ideas of how things should be.

"When I am confident I am right, and when I have evidence to prove it, I don't second-guess myself, I don't back down, and ZFG kicks in."

I see it in myself as well as the women around me. I'm surrounded by confident women. I tend to associate this confidence with women of a certain age. One's late thirties, when the biological clock takes on a sort of DEFCON status, can often feel like a sort of crucible, which, once you've passed through, leaves you feeling quite fearless. What is there left to fear, after all? And let me tell you, it is great. Turning 40 for me felt like Dorothy arriving in the Technicolor world of Oz: Everything was suddenly brighter, more vibrant, filled with opportunity.

And then, hopefully, your next realization is, Wow, actually it's pretty great over here. But maybe that's simply because that's been my own experience. I'm certainly not lacking in younger women friends who have been early adopters. [We all know that ZFG (Zero Fucks Given) kicks in at a certain age, but how wonderful would it be to catch it sooner?]

My friend the TV host and author Stacy London, who has long mastered the confidence game, writes, "I think to myself (instead of why or how can it be me) WHY THE HELL NOT ME? Physiologically speaking, I have the same resources for confidence as anyone else. So I try to tap into that."

When I asked Jessica Bennett, 34, author of the upcoming book Feminist Fight Club, where she got her sense of...confidence, she told me, via email, that it has arrived early.

"I guess I had this sense early on that the grown-ups were not always right, nor was the system, but it took me a while to home into what my own cause was, which would come much later (feminism). It's interesting because on some level my ZFG (zero fucks given) attitude (btw this was one of the nominations for most useful words of the year last weekend at the American Dialect Society) doesn't necessarily mean I don't get insecure, I completely do, like all the time, about all the things. But when I am confident I am right, and when I have evidence to prove it, I don't second guess myself, I don't back down and ZFG kicks in. I guess I also feel like there's so much fakery and bullshit in our era and sometimes it's just so refreshing to hear the unfiltered words of somebody who—right or wrong—just DOES NOT GIVE A FUCK."

"I think to myself (instead of why or how can it be me) WHY THE HELL NOT ME?"

Aminatou Sow, who knows a thing or two about living right, has a different take: "I was raised in a fairly conservative Muslim African household. I was the oldest kid and it wasn't lost on me that my parents didn't treat me less than or take less of an interest in me because I was a girl. That's simply not the case for girls where I come from. Every day that passes, I realize how powerful that was and the lasting impact it's had. Maybe this is a weird third culture kid observation, but it really strikes me that in America confidence is a 'feeling' and not just a way of being or some sort of innate personality trait. I certainly don't 'feel' confident every day but in the style of Beyoncé and Nicky Minaj, I try to feel myself every day. I come from a long line of proud, decisive, and confident African women. I am self-assured, self-reliant, assertive, and I advocate for myself...because if I don't WHO ELSE WILL? I don't know know another way."

I then asked Cindy Gallop, literally the most confident woman I've ever met, to what she attributes her ZFG attitude: "Well, first of all, 55 years of life experience. Second of all, the best moment of my life (and this wasn't an actual moment, more a gradual realization) was the day I realized I no longer give a damn what anybody thinks. Fear of what other people think is the most paralyzing dynamic in business, and in life. Dump that, and you are free to do anything you choose."

Dumping what other people think is, of course, harder than it sounds. Especially in a media age entirely fueled by people giving their opinions about everything. And so I often find myself recalling the advice of my first writing teacher, who during our first class told us we were wasting our time being nervous about reading our works out loud. "You could go downstairs to the corner of Sixth Avenue," he said, "take off all your clothes, and read your story with a bullhorn and you'd be lucky if three people stopped to listen to you."

If you're not quite up to parading your diary nude through the streets of New York, as a lesson in the futility of other people's opinions, you can always just follow Sow's advice for those "not-so-awesome days": bold lipstick and power posing.

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